Gerald Edelman

摘要

Gerald Edelman was a man of diverse talents and broad knowledge. A pre-eminent biologist, he was also an accomplished writer and musician, and read widely in philosophy. This brought an elegant style to his science, and gave his more speculative intellectual works a characteristic literary format. Edelman died on 17 May in La Jolla, California. Born in Queens, New York, in 1929, he studied medicine. He then turned to immunology and spent most of his research career at Rockefeller University in New York. His focus on the structure of antibodies in the 1960s led to the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Rodney Porter. The award recognized Edelman's work on the descriptions of the heavy (H) and light (L) polypeptide chains, and Porters on the distinct binding domain (antigen-binding or Fab fragment) of antibodies (also called immunoglobulins). These were the first dominoes to fall in the elucidation of the structural variability that lies at the heart of antibody-based recognition of infectious agents such as bacteria and viruses. With colleague Joseph Gaily, Edelman discovered that L-chain polypeptides were secreted in the urine of a person with a myeloma tumour. Being homogeneous (that is, each chain contained a single amino acid sequence), these light chains were amenable to structural characterization, unlike the mixture of antibodies in blood.